Wretched Earth

Johnny prowled the room. Lariat stood watching as Drygulch drew the four-foot pry bar from its scabbard fastened to his big rucksack. They all carried empty packs. Their possessions were cached a half mile from the installation’s entrance.

The metal cabinet marked Prions wasn’t all that sturdy. A little poking for purchase, a grunt and heave and a squeal of tormented metal, and the door popped open.

Drygulch resheathed the bar, picked up his lantern and hunkered down to peer inside.

“Little vials in here,” he said.

“Load ’em in your pack,” Lariat said.

Their guide walked to a door at the back of the room. It looked as if it opened by sliding sideways into the alloy wall.

“There’s more through here,” he said.

“Can we open it?” Reno asked dubiously. “Looks a little hefty for Drygulch’s bar.”

“It was open when I was here before,” Johnny said. “I swear it.”

As if to prove his point, he began to pull on it, as if hoping to open it using nothing more than the friction of his fingertips.

Amazingly, it worked. The door slid open with only a token squeal of protest.

“Watch it—” Reno began.

He had no idea what made him voice the aborted warning. Before it finished leaving his mouth a dark shape shot from the blackness beyond the door and hit the kneeling Drygulch as he shouldered his pack. The tall man went over with a crunch that horrified Reno, until he realized it was likely some of the small, seemingly sturdy vials Drygulch had just stuffed in his pack breaking, not his bones.

Then Reno had something to be really horrified about, as he swung his flashlight on target. Its feeble shine revealed what looked to be a spiky-furred gray rat the size of a large dog, but with a snoutful of sharp teeth instead of incisors. And an extra set of appendages like a mantis’s clawed forelimbs jutting from just behind its shoulders, three feet long and covered in gleaming black chitin.

Drygulch had somehow got a hand under the mutie’s lower jaw and was fending off its fangs. For the moment. Reno stepped up so his shotgun’s muzzle was about six inches from where thick neck met misshapen torso, and fired.

The noise was like two cast-iron pans being clapped together either side of his head. Muzzle-flame splashed against the creature’s body. The sickening reek of burned hair went right up Reno’s nostrils like barbs. The charge of scavenged number 4 buck tore the fanged head halfway from the body.

Reno kicked it aside, where it lay with its legs twitching, jaws still snapping, and those awful insectile claws scratching futilely at a synthetic-tiled floor.

Another figure darted from the door. Lariat’s .45 bucked and roared and vomited yellow flame three times, fast. The horror squealed and tumbled into a forward roll that carried it into the far wall.

Johnny stood with his back to the doorway. His lean, handsome face stretched to accommodate a mouth that had become a yawning oval of fear. He held his little carbine halfway to his shoulder as if to shoot at the second creature that had come through.

Then his expression grew strangely curious. Reno heard a sound like somebody stepping on a ripe gourd.

A claw like the first mutie’s suddenly burst through Johnny’s chest. Blood fountained out around it, but didn’t hide the fact that it was way bigger than the one the other rat thing sported. The clawed arm lifted Johnny off the floor. He screamed and flailed his limbs mindlessly. The M-1 carbine cracked with deafening shots, sending ricochets howling around the adventurers.

“Time to go!” Lariat yelled, as a tumbling round glanced off Reno’s shoulder.

Drygulch jumped up and ran. Lariat raced after him, firing her handblaster back into the infinite blackness of the inner doorway. Backpedaling into the corridor, Reno started to warn his boss that she might hit their guide.

Then he asked himself why that would be a bad thing.

* * *

“LET ME LOOK AT IT,” Reno said.

Drygulch held his wounded arm away. “No. It’s fine. Leave me ’lone.”

The last of their jackrabbit stew boiled in a cast-iron kettle on a little break-down aluminum tripod over a campfire of driftwood and dried weeds. Some flakes of what Lariat claimed was sage bubbled in the mix.

The stew smelled to Reno like stinkbug ass. He guessed it would taste worse. But after this day a good case of the running shits would only be appropriate. Anyway, he was hungry enough to eat a stinkbug’s ass. A whole pot of stinkbug asses.

But by the sick yellow light of the flames, he made out something disturbing. Reddish inflammation, shot through with nasty dark discoloration, crept up the man’s lanky arm from his bandaged hand.

Lariat pronounced the stew done. Drygulch refused any, which right there showed he was in bad shape. Reno ate his share with relish. It was definitely better than stinkbug ass. If not much else.

When nothing remained that his spoon could catch, Reno licked his bowl. Then he scrubbed it with dirt and a handful of crackly, dry bunchgrass. As he stuffed his hobo tool and bowl in his pack, Lariat motioned him aside.

The night sky was full of stars. An orange moon hung near the western horizon. Wind quested restlessly through sere grass. Most of the light snow that had fallen earlier had melted away.

“So what do you think he’s got?” she asked.

Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Won’t let me look at it.”

“I can hear you,” Drygulch said. “Got no call talking about me in the third person like I was a…a rock or somethin’. Insultin’.”

“Well, if some damn fool hadn’t gone and stuck his hand in his pack and gotten cut to shit on broken glass, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lariat said.

“I was tryin’ to find out if them prion vials was okay after I landed on ’em!”

“And found out the hard way you’d busted most of them.”

“We got a few intact, Lariat,” Reno said. He hated disputes. He knew how quickly nasty could erupt. When that happened it was usually him who wound up getting the bad end of the ass-wiping stick. “Oughta be able to get something for them, if we find the right whitecoats.”

“I can do that,” she said. Then, taking Reno by the arm, she urged him a little farther outside the circle of faint firelight. And more important, out of the aggrieved Drygulch’s earshot.

“Could it mebbe be gangrene?” she asked.

“Too soon,” Reno said. “Could be blood poisoning, though.”

He glanced uneasily back at the tall man, who had slithered into his bedroll and deliberately lain down with his back to his comrades as well as the fire.

“I wonder if those prions have anything to do with his condition,” Reno said softly.

“Doesn’t much matter if the stupe won’t let us look at it,” Lariat said in a tone that suggested it didn’t much matter to her if he did. “He doesn’t wake up in the morning, we’ll know something was wrong.”

* * *

COMMOTION ROUSED RENO from a wondrous dream of soft sheets and blow jobs.

He sat up. By the vagrant red gleam of the low coals they’d kicked the fire into before bedding down, he saw Drygulch thrashing in his sleeping bag. He moaned like an animal in distress.

“Drygulch?” Reno asked tentatively.